Board of Directors

From the Board

We are passionate about the need for Health Informatics education. We see this as an essential building block underpinning the necessary reform in the health industry so that the population as a whole will have equitable access to safe and effective health care within a sustainable health system.

Collectively the two of us bring more than 60 years Health Informatics experience, whilst working in or for the health industry in a variety of positions underpinned by formal qualifications and work experience in nursing, health information management, health administration, work study (industrial engineering), public service, information and communication technologies (ICT) and education, applied in both the health industry and the tertiary education sector.

We are internationally recognised for our collective Health Informatics expertise, including competency development and extensive in-depth terminology and casemix knowledge including SNOMED-CT, ICD-10-AM, and cost weight development research as well as national and international health informatics standards development experience.

Collectively we have more than 40 years of higher education teaching and curriculum development experience.

Evelyn J.S. Hovenga RN PhD FACS FACHI

CEO, Director, Company Secretary & Public Officer

Evelyn’s work during the 1980’s as an independent health service management consultant for private and public hospitals was combined with doctoral research studies in health administration (nursing informatics). Appointed at Central Queensland University in 1992 where she was promoted to Professor in Health Informatics in 2003. Evelyn managed its health informatics program and research centre, and the school of management and information systems till 2007. Her experience and expertise covers many facets of health informatics especially standards development, health terminology and electronic health records incl. knowledge management and ontology.

Evelyn was a foundation member of the Health Informatics Society of Australia and a foundation Fellow of the Australiasian College of Health Informatics for which she initiated the establishment of the Australian Health Informatics Education Council that undertook the initial developmental work towards the establishment of nationally recognised Health Informatics competencies.
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The first openEHR archetype repository was developed at CQU’s Health Informatics research centre, this is now the internationally known as the Clinical Knowledge Manager. Evelyn facilitated and managed all HL7 Australia educational activities for several years; was an invited expert to IMIA’s Nursing Informatics group competency development workshop in 1987, the European Nightingale Nursing Informatics competency development project during the early 1990s, an invited member of the International Medical Informatics Association’s education taskforce. She participated in the original development of the medical (health) informatics education recommendations and the 2010 review and update of these curriculum guidelines. Evelyn chaired IMIA’s education workgroup for several years during which time a text edited by her and Prof John Mantas on Global Health Informatics Education (2004) was published by IOS Press.

Evelyn was the Chief Editor of the electronic Journal of Health Informatics www.ejhi.net/ for 10 years and has numerous publications that can be accessed via www.researchgate.net.
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PhD (UNSW) awarded February 1995 , Thesis: Casemix, Hospital Nursing Resource Usage and Costs.

RN, 1977 Registered as a General Nurse in Victoria and in Queensland in 1992.

1980 Certificate of Workstudy – Footscray Institute of Technology (now Victoria University), supplemented by the successful completion of a course of instruction on Modular Arrangement of Predetermined Time Standards (MODAPTS) including concise office and transit modapts.

1984 Short course in statistics for research workers at Melbourne University.

1989 Successfully completed four subjects within the Graduate Diploma Course in Applied Information Systems at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

2010 TAE40110 Certificate IV in Training and Assessment
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Heather Grain A.Dip MRA, GDIS, MHI, FACHI

Director, Chief Development Officer, IT Service Manager

Consultant Lecturer – Melbourne University – EHRs, Health Data and Standards, RMIT University ICD-10-AM, Convenor ICO TC215 Health Informatics – Semantic Content Working Group, Chair HL7 International Terminology Authority, Co-Chair HL7 International Vocabulary Working Group, Expert member IHTSDO eLearning Committee. Heather is a Fellow of the Australasian College of Health Informatics and a qualified HIM. She has extensive national and international experience as an educator but also in the practical design and implementation of EHRs, health data and standards for health data and record systems

Heather’s industry background includes practical workplace based, and high level strategic business analysis and data specification and management, including terminology, classification to support clinical decision support systems and identification management as well as key measure definition and reporting specification. While working in her specialist domain she has concurrently worked as a senior academic in health informatics at Melbourne and La Trobe Universities and many other universities in Australia and around the world and in recent years extended this into vocational education through eHe. Heather is an internationally recognised consultant in eHealth and electronic health records advising government bodies and projects (including the Australian Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record), software vendors, healthcare provider organisations (including hospitals, diagnostic services, community services such as district nursing and general practice and allied health). Her experience is extensive and recognises the need to be practical and to work progressively to develop infrastructure and processes which are safe as well as effective, while being future focused.

Heather is an internationally recognised consultant in eHealth and electronic health records advising government bodies and projects (including the Australian Personally Controlled Electronic Health Record), software vendors, healthcare provider organisations (including hospitals, diagnostic services, community services such as district nursing and general practice and allied health). Her experience is extensive and recognises the need to be practical and to work progressively to develop infrastructure and processes which are safe as well as effective, while being future focused.

Heather is responsible for reviewing and establishing quality processes for HL7 international education activities, and developed SNOMED CT foundation competencies (within IHTSDO) and the first international course delivering content to support skill development in this area. She is a senior contributor to the development of the competency specifications for core Health Informaticians in Australia.
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M.H.I (CQU) 2008 Masters by research: Investigation of the ontology and information model of morbidity reporting in the electronic health record environment.